Yesterday, an article with Stuff owner and CEO Sinead Boucher was released on their website.
It was a wide ranging interview that included discussion about the significant impact big tech companies such as Google, Meta, and TikTok are having on traditional, New Zealand owned media companies.
These platforms attract the vast majority of New Zealand’s digital advertising spend, but due to a lack of regulation they avoid paying a meaningful tax bill in New Zealand. This is galling for local media companies who invest in journalism and content, only to watch big tech scrape, crawl and extract this content for their own gain.
We’ve all seen the result of this disruption. Local newspapers, television broadcasters and online news outlets have experienced declining revenues, leading to newsroom closures and job losses.
We can’t blame big tech entirely for the challenges facing traditional media. Consumer habits have shifted towards digital platforms and local media companies have struggled to adapt to audience expectations and preferences.
The Government should have a legitimate and important role to play in all of this, but are nowhere to be seen. They could be regulating big tech to create a fair and competitive digital marketplace and to protect the public interest by maintaining a strong, independent media sector which supports democracy and informed public debate.
So why is the Government continuing to drag its feet when to comes to anything to do with big tech? Be it social media bans, criminalising deep fakes, requiring digital platforms to negotiate payments for news content, or making them pay an appropriate amount of tax? Is it too hard or too complex? Is there a lack of interest? Or is it self-serving?
Boucher shared some concerning feedback she’s had from politicians:
“There’s some actual things that senior politicians have said to me in the last year: One said ‘If you were nicer to us, maybe we would care if you lived or died’. Another said ‘We effectively weighed up the interests of you and big tech and decided they were more important to the country than journalistic organisations’.”
Boucher also claimed politicians today are thinner-skinned than they used to be, which they quite possibly are. If you can’t handle scrutiny, I’m not sure you’re in the right job. But after watching Scrutiny Week in Parliament I would suggest politicians are as brutal to their colleagues as the media can be to them.
I’ve had politicians complain to me about a media organisation or individual journalist before, but there has always been an understanding that democracy requires the fourth estate and that where there are politicians there will be media, and vice versa.
I’m giving politicians the benefit of the doubt that they’re not so petty as to allow the demise of democracy because of their own fears, self-interest and inadequacies.
But it still begs the question, with all its social harm, misinformation, disinformation, scams, deep fakes, AI slop and disregard for suppression, why is the NZ Government so scared of making a move against big tech?
Unfortunately, I suspect it’s a clear sign of who wears the pants in the relationship.
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